During this, the filament layers are pressurised in several stages with wafer thin water jets with a pressure of 250 bar. Instead of welding the filament layers together point by point as is conventional, they entangle under the water jet treatment intensively with each other in all directions.

Water jet compacted fleece is very much softer and more supple to handle than spunbond fleece. In addition to improved haptics, improved mechanical characteristic values result at the same time: especially the maximum lateral force increases by entangling the filaments. One of the decisive prerequisites to do that is created by the Gramix S9 dosing station; it supplies the extruder with a continuous, true-to formula and longitudinal homogeneous mass flow.

Configured from modular building blocks, capable of solving the task

The dosing station weighing funnels can be individually adapted from one graduated standard-size modular system to each processing machine. In the system installed for the nonwoven fabric plant, the weighing container for the major constituent has a volume of 100 l, suitable for flow rates of 100 to 1,200 kg/h. For the minor constituents there are two smaller dosing units with 6 l tank volumes (for throughputs of 1 to 60 kg/h) and three 25 litre weighing units for throughputs of 12 to 300 kg/h. The infinitely variable servomotors driving the proportioning screw placed under the hopper scales continuously convey the minor components in the dead-space-free mixing zone where it flows
together with the incoming major constituent. For safety reasons, in the nonwoven fabric plant a metal separator follows to eject any possibly dragged-along, even smallest metal particles from being fed into the material in the extruder. The extruders are always run in the overfed state in order not to risk any break-off of individual filaments on the spinning beam due to insufficient material supply.

If the material volumes in the weighing funnels sink to a preset minimum, material is refilled from the storage containers located above automatically and in the shortest time. These containers are equipped with suction conveyor stations to immediately convey new material from the silo or the storage containers. A central vacuum generator (rotary piston compressor station) supplies the negative pressure required for vacuum conveying at the conveyor stations combined with a central filter to collect and eject dust particles carried along in the conveyor air.

All functions and components for material conveyance and material dosing are continuously monitored with the powerful, user-friendly Simatic S7 microprocessor controller. Communication with the nonwoven fabric plant control takes place via a Profibus interface. However, the S7 controller can even additionally control the extruder and the subsequent trigger unit.